


Displacement

by Xparrot



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Episode 43: Visitor, Episode Tag, M/M, Pets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 03:19:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1329937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xparrot/pseuds/Xparrot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos meets with Cecil after "Visitor", to comfort, and to contemplate, as a scientist does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Displacement

**Author's Note:**

> Yay to everyone who's already written tags for this ep. It needs them so badly! (And fortunately some are more comforting than this one...what the hell, Carlos?)

Carlos meets Cecil at the animal hospital. He doesn't text ahead; he's not sure what to write. Listening regularly to a radio show has improved his communication skills, as has being in a long-term relationship; but he doesn't know what to say for this.

As it turns out he doesn't have to say anything. When he enters he sees Cecil standing by the waiting room counter. The triple-eyed receptionist is speaking, but Cecil doesn't appear to be listening. His head is down; his shoulders are hunched, curled in. His tie is askew, and one of his trouser legs is ripped. He looks too small, and his shadow behind him too large, too dark to be accounted for by the fluorescent lights and mismatched to his stooped shape. 

But he looks up when the door opens, despondent gaze focusing on Carlos. He opens his mouth, but doesn't speak. And Carlos doesn't try to answer. He just closes the distance between them, opens his arms and lets Cecil turn into them.

Cecil presses his face into Carlos's shoulder, lets go one choked sob and then just leans against him. Carlos puts his arms around Cecil's shoulders, not trying to massage the tension from his back, just holds still, holding him.

It takes a little while, before Cecil says, "It wasn't even my birthday."

"I know," Carlos says. He has that date marked in every calendar, electronic device, and timepiece he possesses, in the hopes that at least one of them will accurately denote it.

"Would it have been better if it were? Or worse? I can't decide."

Carlos isn't sure himself. By Night Vale standards the day's events almost reached the pitch of a holiday. Perhaps it would've been an observance worthy of as notable an individual as Cecil. But Carlos has enough outsider left in him to want to commemorate significant days with joy instead of horror.

Instead of answering he asks, "How is your leg?"

"All right," Cecil says. "One of the animal control people cleaned and bandaged it up."

Carlos nods, relieved. He trusts animal control more than most of the medical personnel at Night Vale General anyway.

Case in point, the veterinary surgeon who comes out to talk with Cecil speaks in low, polite tones in normal English, rather than hoots or whistles. She takes them back behind the counter to the kennel room, low-lit for the night. At their footsteps, various animals stir in their cubbies with sleepy or nervous whimpers and hisses and rattles.

Cecil's breath catches when he sees Khoshekh's cage. He drops to his knees, puts his fingers to the wire door. "Oh, my sweet kitty," he says, "my baby boy, what did that thing, that _monster_ , do to you? And what can I do for you now, what can any of us do now..."

The shape huddled in the back of the cubby doesn't make a sound. But the other creatures in the surrounding kennels snarl and yowl in answer. The room is too dim to see into any cage clearly, but there is a thrashing of leathery wings in one, the screeching scrape of claws against metal in another. Something that may be a dog but probably isn't begins a long, ululating howl, prickling the hairs on the back of Carlos's neck.

"Mr. Palmer," the veterinarian says over the rising noise, "I warned you not to disturb our other patients, or you'll have to leave."

"—I'm sorry," Cecil says, soft and contrite, "I'll be quiet."

At the final word, every animal in the room falls abruptly silent, like an orchestra called to order by its conductor.

The veterinarian looks around in concern, steps closer to peer into one of the cages. The unidentified animal within stares back, docile and silent, blinking round golden eyes.

"Can we stay for a little while?" Carlos asks the vet in an undertone.

"Well..." She throws Cecil a cautious glance, then nods hasty agreement and departs, leaving them alone in the kennel but for the animals.

Carlos crouches next to Cecil, puts a hand on his shoulder as he ducks to look into Khoshekh's cage. The cat is curled around a towel, eyes closed, narrow sides barely moving in his drugged sleep. In the dimness it's hard to make out the full extent of his injuries, but the silhouette is wrong, too smooth and regular. There are but a few spines jutting from the curved back, and only shaved, stitched patches on the cat's neck where his venom sacks should be. 

And of course, he's lying on the floor of the cage, rather than floating over it; that's the worst of all.

"Could you hear him?" Cecil says. "In the bathroom, when that—that _thing_ attacked him—"

His voice barely rises a decibel, but it's enough to elicit low growls from the cages around them. Cecil swallows and drops his voice to a whispered rendition of his calmest announcer's tone, "He growled at first, but then he made these most terrible, heartbreakingly pathetic wails, such as I've never heard from him before."

"You mean, that was Khoshekh meowing?" Carlos asks. Having heard Khoshekh's vocalizations in the past, he'd assumed those cries were from Strex's artificial creature.

"I wouldn't call such awful noises _meowing_ ," Cecil says. "I've never heard a cat meow like _that_ , so soft and wretched, without so much as an echo of a metallic overtone."

 _At least, not a cat in Night Vale_ , Carlos could say; could mention that he'd heard such feline cries many times before he moved here. But what good would it do, when they are in Night Vale? It would be no more comfort than to tell Cecil that most cats outside Night Vale have no venom or tendril hubs; that most cats don't float in fixed positions.

Khoshekh had been absolutely suited to his environment. Had found a place, or perhaps a place had found him, a particular vacuum of spacetime within the station restroom that had somehow required a cat to fill it. Either way, if he were an atypical, dangerous creature, it was only because he had adapted to the atypical dangers of his position, had grown to perfectly fit the limits of his location, as strange an existence as it might have appeared to an outside observer. 

And then, to be ripped from that bizarre, bizarrely perfect position, maybe never to return to it...perhaps the damage hadn't been dealt by Strex's creature after all, but by the very act of Khoshekh's dislocation. Because such a cat could only exist in that form in that specific place; there was no space for his existence anywhere else.

Carlos shudders, his hand tightening around Cecil's shoulder. Cecil reaches up to clasp Carlos's hand in one of his own. His other still rests on the kennel cubby's wire mesh, as he stares through it at his beloved pet. "They will pay for this," Cecil says, so softly Carlos can only make out the words by reading the movement of Cecil's lips. "Oh, they will pay, pain for pain, thrice over, that they hurt an innocent, a simple creature that never did them or their precious financial interests any harm. We will make them pay..."

The other animals are moving restlessly in their kennels, whining in harmonious pitches, an unnerving counterpoint to Cecil's whisper. It's only out of concern for disturbing them that Carlos squeezes his shoulder, and Cecil shuts his mouth.

He's rarely heard Cecil sound so angry. At one time it would have frightened Carlos, to hear such wrath in the Voice of Night Vale. 

Now he simply murmurs, "This isn't the place for that, but tell me later, how we can make them pay. I have some ideas of my own..." He's been considering it since he first heard Cecil exclaim in pain. Plotting the station's parking lot for the best positions to lay bait for the giant scorpions. Or, if he can get hold of Strex's bio-monster and hack its positronic net to seek different targets...possibly upgrade its offensive systems while he's at it...

Perhaps at one time this would have frightened Carlos, too, to know his own thoughts now. To know that he even could think such things, much less intend to follow through on them. But he's been in Night Vale a long time. 

"You do?" Cecil asks. For the first time tonight, he sounds, if not happy, then hopeful, a little of his boundless optimism finally seeping back into his voice, like a trickle of water in parched desert sand.

"I do," Carlos says, leaning his shoulder into Cecil's, warmed by the contact, and the shared, silent comradery of contemplating horrific vengeance.

It won't heal Khoshekh. And it's not enough to fill the hole his absence leaves, in the station bathroom's spacetime. In Cecil's heart. But then, as difficult as it is to preserve a vacuum, if those spaces can be kept open, Khoshekh may have a place to return to.

Carlos has some ideas about that as well. Veterinary medicine is outside the scope of his science, but not the impractical physics of antigravity. If he can manipulate the station's locii, decrease the curve of the gravitational constant...

His mental calculations are interrupted by a soft mew. Beside him, Cecil freezes. "Khohekh?" he murmurs, frantic and anxious. "Oh, sweetheart, I'm here, can you hear me, I'm right here—"

Khoshekh mews again. In the dim light his eyes glow green as they open, and his tail twitches. Cecil tugs at the cage door but can't undo the padlock. That's probably for the best, as Khoshekh does still have several spine ridges, plus an impressive set of teeth that gleam as he yawns.

"Khoshekh," Cecil says, poking his fingers as far into the cage as he can reach them, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry you're in this cage. I'm so sorry I couldn't protect you in time, but I'll take care of you, you'll get better—"

Khoshekh crawls forward on his belly, slowly and pained, only as far as Cecil's fingers can reach. Carlos almost takes Cecil's wrist to pull his hand out of the cage, but the cat doesn't bite. Instead he rubs the side of his head, below the remaining tendrils, against Cecil's fingers.

A rasping, grating rumble vibrates the air, throbbing in the base of Carlos's skull and making his teeth grit involuntarily.

"Is that a purr?" Cecil asks, his hushed tone pitched high with joy. "Are you purring? Oh, Khoshekh, who's a good boy? Who's such a good boy?"

Khoshekh nudges Cecil's fingers again, then puts his head down on his paws and shuts his eyes. A moment later the vibration ceases, fading into silent, slow breathing.

"He woke up! He knows me! Isn't that wonderful, Carlos?"

Carlos unclenches his jaw to return Cecil's smile. "I'm a scientist, not a veterinarian, so I can't say for certain; but yes, I think it's a good sign." After all, he's never heard a cat make a sound like that before. 

He understands it, though. Could hear in it the relief he felt himself, hurrying into the clinic tonight and seeing Cecil, hurting but still whole. 

Perhaps Khoshekh was not ripped from the air, but rather threw himself from it. Tore himself from where he belonged, as painful and as possibly permanent as that displacement was, to defend something more important than his own unique existence. Someone more important.

Carlos wonders at the animal's bravery, to make that sacrifice. He hopes he'll have such courage himself, should the time come.

He thinks he will. If only because he knows the possible consequences if he doesn't, better now than before. Tonight was a tragedy, not a lesson; but Carlos can learn from anything. Can adapt. It's part of being a scientist. Part of being alive.

For now, however, he just sits next to Cecil on the kennel's cool tile floor, their backs against an empty dog crate, watching Khoshekh sleep. Cecil leans in, and Carlos puts his arm around Cecil's shoulders. It fits there perfectly.


End file.
